Creak as a Sociophonetic Marker

It may seem odd to begin a discussion by stating what we are not going to do, but we need to do that here, given the coverage already extended to creak. What we are not going to adopt is a physiological, acoustic or aerodynamic approach to the description of creak. Nor are we concerned with its clinical incidence or origins. Even the use of creak as phonologically contrastive in languages is not a central issue in our discussion. The aspect of creak which attracted our attention was its occurrence in ‘normal’ contextualised speech: the speech of non-pathological female and male speakers of two accents of British English.